Helping organisations and citizens solve many different problems through a flexible Shared Perspectives approach.

What?

An approach developed by Community Catalysts, building on our strong history and extensive experience of exploratory, action planning and culture change work. Specifically:

• Exploring and learning – really understanding the context, challenges and opportunities
• Developing and shepherding a joint action plan for local change
• Supporting local system and culture change

There is potential to use the Shared Perspectives approach in many different ways for example: to explore gaps in supports and services and work together to find creative ways to fill them; to bring together social care, health and community perspectives; to explore ways that public sector commissioning can be a positive force for change or to coproduce plans designed to radically disrupt the status quo.

How?

Whatever the focus the approach in detail is likely to include some or all of these elements:

Exploring and learning – really understanding the context, challenges and opportunities

• Having conversations to learn about the systems, processes and culture that underpin care, health or wellbeing approaches in a locality.
• Analysing the results and reporting and/or making recommendations for action based on this analysis.

Developing and shepherding a joint action plan for local change

• Convening and facilitating a Change Group involving diverse stakeholders from many sectors including public sector, VSCE and wider community.
• Producing or coproducing a shared action plan for system and culture change and agreeing it locally.
• Driving the implementation of this action plan and holding others to account.

Supporting local system and culture change

• Designing and delivering workshops and networking events.
• Producing and sharing information, including collated stories of strong practice.
• Producing reports – presenting, advocating and challenging people at all levels in a locality to encourage brave and creative strategic and operational action.
• Acting as a critical friend.
• Offering local leads the opportunity to join a wider national or regional peer network. Using this network work to help people develop stronger, more personalised local practice.

We deliver Shared Perspectives directly, using a consultancy approach to work through a senior project manager and more local project worker/s. We take a strong partnership approach, learning from and building on what already works well. The focus of the work to be undertaken together with the scale and scope of activity governs the duration of a Shared Perspectives project and its cost.

Impact

While Shared Perspectives can run over a short-term to spark local change, we have also used it successfully in the past to underpin longer term work, preparing local leads to act, build, change and grow new ways of working. For example by:

• Advising and guiding areas that want to use Local Area Coordination as a route to community development and whole system change
• Employing a Catalyst to nurture small enterprises who develop care and health services and create real choice
• Developing a People Can programme that enables people with lived experience to lead or create their own enterprise